Lemma Soft Forums

I need help with making Instrumental music.

I currently use FLStudio and I make EDM and house music so I have experience, but I haven't had much luck with instrumental music. Mostly due to the lack of finding a good enough tutorial and not having a good enough sounding plugin.

Does anyone know of any good plugins that sound good? (I need plugins for strings (violins and cellos) and woodwinds.) Preferably free.

Also does anyone know of any good tutorials? Any advise would be appreciated as well.

DSK Overture is phenomenal. In terms of advice, I would say experiment. Place different notes together on the Piano Roll, swap out your plugin and see how it sounds with a different instrument, build your melody from simple loops, and so forth!

The learning process itself is a fun way for you to stretch your creative muscles. Tutorials are certainly good to start, but much like drawing the best way to get better is to jump right in and get your feet wet with many hours of practice.

Great sounding music can be achieved even with the cheapest samples. Having the best sounding library won't mean much of anything if the composition is lacking.

DSK plugins are a great suggestion. They're free with decent sound. I say the best thing you should focus on right now is learning harmony between instruments. Listen to your favorite songs and find out what makes their instruments complement each other.

I second what Sonomi and Graff said. Focus on good writing. Amazing things can be even achieved with MuseScore and soundfonts if the writing is good. Then again, as you advance in your clientel, requirements for sound quality increase. The truth is, if you want sounds like Two Steps from Hell uses, you need to pay a lot of money (pirating software is very much not appreciated in the industry...). My favorite so far is Vienna Symphonic Library. Spitfire Audio creates amazing things too. East West offers a subscription.

But as said now thrice before, focus on good writing. You will do nothing with the good sounds if you cant write good music with them.

One thing I found that helps a lot in making decent Instrumental music is in analyzing existing pieces and directly writing off of them. For example taking an odd folk tune in a weird time an preforming a modulation then normalizing the structure in a different time I.e 6/4 to 4/4 is a really good way to start thinking of ways to be more melodic and to conceive new ideas. Also always focus on your chord choices, you can make some crazy stuff by adding 7ths and 9ths or even 13th's.

For plugins I use dsk stuff, they had a deal were you could give a small amount and they would give you a gigantic library with a lot of good samples. Also within FL you can add your own samples and trigger them or set them to whatever pitch you want. It's a bit tedious but i've gotten good results. Also Sakura and Sytrus are two really good plugins that can give you a lot so don't pass them by.